How can you measure the success of a PR campaign that heavily relies on social media trends?

To measure a social media-focused PR campaign's success: - Engagement Rates: Track likes, shares, and comments. - Reach & Impressions: Measure how many people see your posts. - Sentiment Analysis: Assess public sentiment in comments and discussions. - Conversion Rates: Monitor actions like website visits or sign-ups. - Trend Alignment: Evaluate how well your campaign leverages current trends.

One of the most genuine if not the most genuine metrics in the list in my view, as it is the one that relies the most on your communication work. An influencer took a lot of time to build its community and its reach, they bring that and their own brand to the table; it is up to you to develop a concept that will get them to engage with the content you want to promote through the amplificator that is an influencer. Beyond sales (that are, to me, on the other end of the marketing funnel), there are very few metrics that can tell you more transparently than engagement rate how good or bad a job your agency is doing with its strategic council.

To measure the success of a PR campaign leveraging social media trends, track engagement metrics such as likes, shares, and comments. Analyze follower growth, reach, and impressions. Monitor brand mentions and sentiment analysis. Use these insights to evaluate the campaign's impact. "Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success."

Reach in PR is an outdated metrics, and it is questionable whether reach should have ever been really relevant for social media campaigns given the major issues with fake accounts, bots and follower trades/buying. Reach is a hotchpotch of much more relevant data you need to consider. Most agencies sell you the big reach figures of their largest influencers for larger and larger amounts of money. "You want to speak to millions? We have millions for you if you have millions in the bank". All in all, it will be more time-consuming but systematically more efficient and rewarding to work with smaller influencers that you know will be the perfect match for your brand and your product, be it demographically or geographically.

You cannot use this as a metric if you are trusting "tools" to do this very particular job. Sentiment analysis on SoMe is only relevant as far as you can trust your data. The day an AI will be able to accurately classify sentences the feeling of a user sharing sentences such as "Wow, this is something else!" or my favorite "I have no words for this." through cross referencing previous posts and different SoMe platforms (in short, when GDPR dies), then maybe sentiment analysis will become more useful. Key feature or key messaging pull-through rates are a much more representative data with far less room for errors. You will miss some, but the machine can more easily identify where a post stands on that front.

Ask this very same question under the "Marketing" category and you will have diametrically opposed answers. This is where we butt heads in every single meeting we have with them! PR and SoMe efforts are impossible to track accurately, and marketers hate it. For the budget one might want to spend on PR/SoMe selling smoke and mirrors, they can get a solid media buying campaign they have absolute control over. John/Jane Doe reading your hard-earned product review in a tier 1 media, moving on with their life and then googling your product/brand days later is not something they would track back to your effort, unfortunately. All measures mentioned, by the way, are essentially applicable in the context of paid placements or affiliate deals.

A SoMe/Influence campaign is only going to be as good as the influencer pool you selected. Even with the perfect influencer fit, there are so many factors that are totally out of your control that could come in the way of your success that you don't want to really take a gamble and go with whoever is open to talking about your product. Take the time, do the work, check data and approach people you are convinced are a match to your product or brand. The most important, though, is to work WITH the influencer. They need to understand what you want to achieve, and you need to be open to their ideas, even if they are not 100% on brand. Run away from people taking a brief without asking any question, you are just a paycheck to them.